ABSTRACT
This chapter presents the case of a drama therapist's 21-year-old son who is a college student and a person who functions somewhere on the autism spectrum. It offers reflections upon how the son has utilized drama as a form of self-therapy to examine questions about his identity and relationships. It explores how the literal and metaphoric performance of the son's selves has been an essential part of his construction of existential consciousness. The investigation in this chapter is both ethnographic and autoethnographic. Drama therapists working clinically and aesthetically embrace psychological theories built upon the constructions of everyday life. Autism both limits and delimits the relational drama requiring, at times, endless repetitions to forge safety and comfort and, at other times, the development of new ways of being in and comprehending relational experience that fall outside of typical interactions.
